Rare, Medium or Well Done - steak

Just hold it under the chef's armpit for 30seconds.

I still think a lot of people are nervous when confronted with a bleeding lump of flesh, so it's good that alternatives ae offered, even if the chef is cursing you.

Yeah, salmonella, bacteria, etc. Gotta be real careful. I'm really funny about my meat now.

I've seen duck served almost raw. I'm not sure what the differences are between the kinds of poultry. I have absolutely no idea how goose should be cooked/served.

Are things like tongue, kidney, offal dying out with our generation?

Despite previous bans on offal I can't remember these pieces of meat ever being popular with my own age group.

peppercorn sauce

Is kobe beef worth investing in? I've found some suppliers doing the steaks quite reasonably (about £11 per steak) so I wondered whether it was worth doing, or whether it was all hype.

been loving cheap rib eye steak from tesco, etc. sacreligiously, a little dab of ketchup enhances the steak no end (but the chips taste best dipped in the steak blood)

I fired up a couple of days ago and grilled some really, really thick ribeyes, holy shit they were good. Letting the meat come to room temp before grilling is U & K.

Ground beef I'll eat no rarer than medium or medium-well (but I don't really like ground beef anyway) and chicken I want jerky-fied. I double the recommended time on my George Foreman for chicken breasts, and it comes out fairly dry, but with all the spices I put on it, no charring and just a hint of flavorable juiciness.

Dud: People who order it by telling the server they "want it still mooing."

Rock Hardy OTM - bloody potato = lush.

i'm a medium-rare man... any rarer and it seriously hurts my jaw to chew that much (i have a kinda fucked joint in my jaw)

Actually I quite like steak tartare n'all.

best steak i have had was in your neck of the woods. moishe's fillet steak & coleslaw and potatoes like i've never tasted before or since.

Fillet steak fondue, anyone?

to my shame i've never been! (a little too pricey for me... although i should save up and try it at least once)

whoever said 'rare tuna steak' was OTM to the power of a thousand, it's amazingly good eating.

Ideally then with a home made bearnaise, which is something you only do twice a year as you realise how fantastically bad a butter based warm mayonnaise is for you :)

genius

1. Lady in the butcher wants some steak to go in a stew, asks for fillet. Butcher says she'd be better off with some chuck. She takes offence at being offered a cheaper cut, insists on fillet. Butcher and I exchange glances.

2. Man comes into my local cheap-but-decent Chinese takeaway, orders chicken fried rice and a steak, well done.

And a beef crime:

Stravaigin states on its menu that they only cook their burgers medium or well-done due to the government's policy on cattle feed. They haven't figured out this translates as 'we use shit beef'.

I've given up ordering steak in this country. Even in good restaurants, they promise to bring it blue and it arrives brown. I'm going to France in July, and I'll have Aveyron beef every night. That'll do me.

This is due to the fact my mother seems to think she can do an American accent, always using this phrase as an example...

genius

the original

The kobe beef I've had ( at the likes of Nobu ) was absolutely transcendant. Go for it !

xpost on the rare tuna steak...it's sublime.

Je suis jaloux.

'Saving for well-done' is a time-honored tradition dating back to cuisine's earliest days: meat and fish cost money. Every piece of cut, fabricated food must, ideally, be sold for even three or even four times its cost in order for the chef to make his food cost percent. So what happens when the chef finds a tough, slightly skanky end-cut or sirloin, that's been pushed repeatedly to the back of the pile? He can throw it out, but that's a total loss, representing a three-fold loss of what it cost him per pound. He can feed it to the family, which is the same as throwing it out. Or he can 'save for well-done' -- serve it to some rube who prefers to eat his meat or fish incinerated into a flavorless, leathery hunk of carbon, who won't be able to tell if what he's eating is food or flotsam. Ordinarily, a proud chef would hate this customer, hold him in contempt for destroying his fine food. But not in this case. This dumb bastard is paying for the privelege of eating his garbage. What's not to like?

That is a perfect definition of justice.

I like mine: Porterhouse, 1" thick cut, rubbed in fresh-growned peppercorn, cooked on a grill, mesquite, bloody, eaten with hands, hunched-over, growling at passers by. The bone should be clean when finished.

PS rare and anyone who is saying otherwise is kind of sad (unless you have a physical condition like s1ocki mentions). OTM re: basically raw tuna steak too, in fact I am making that for dinner tonight.

My boss took me to lunch in a very nice restaurant once, and I ordered pork loin or pork chops or something. It came out looking lovely, I sliced in and discovered that the pork was rare. I was terrified, but the waiter informed me that the whole cooking pork thing was just a myth. I ate a little, and I'm sure it would've been fine, but I was tramautized by historic accounts of people dying from under-cooked pork. Is it true?

1)the government has cracked down heavily on the sanitation of pigs, and what they eat, since your grandma or even your mother first started cooking pork. Pigs are safer than they once were.

2) Pigs have also gotten a lot leaner, due to health concerns in the 70's. Used to be, you could cook a piece of pork to 180 degrees, and it would still be juicy because it had so much fat in it. If you do that nowadays, you get leather.

Not the same for chicken though? Because salmonella is a different type of illness? Not really sure. I've never overly cared, I just hate the way undercooked chicken feels and tastes.

OTM. "Slopping the hogs" used to be a literal practice -- they fed pigs anything, since they will eat anything. No longer.

The cuts may have changed, but they've been breeding leaner pigs, too. To the consternation of many a chef.

What a wonderful phrase! I've never heard it before. I love almost all those embarrassing dad phrases. You know, the cliché, low brow catch-phrases one would insert in a screen play to render, in two dimensions, an out-of-touch father or a country mouse in the big city.

Trichinosis is caused by a tiny worm (ew), whereas salmonella is a bacteria. Salmonella is more common and much easier to spread by bad kitchen habits. Apart from that, alls I can tell you is that I'm sure I've had mild salmonella poisoning from my local taqueria more than once, and I got sick, oh yes I did. Don't have the chicken. Chicken is boring anyway.

Which makes me wonder, when I say that "chicken is boring," if it doesn't taste so bland and ordinary *because* of these horrible farm practices. I've had fresh chicken from the yard, but I was really young. I wonder what someone from 100 years ago would say about the falvor of factory farmed chicken. Would they say it tastes like chicken, or would they hardly recognize it?

Brick Top: You're always gonna have problems lifting a body in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut up a corpse into six pieces and pile it all together.

Sol: Would someone mind telling me, who are you?

Brick Top: And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig".

Btw, chicken properly raised on a small-scale farm (as well as eggs) is amazingly tasty.

(xpost)

that's not what a really interesting article in the current harpers claims.

rare pork is wonderful, btw...

See Jaq's post.

Incredibly OTM! Free-range eggs >>>>>>>>>>>>> ordinary pasteurized eggs.

um, what? some mothers can't cook.

rare is obviously the answer to this question.

I don't like pork though. Smells like cooked human.

It may be a fiction, but it's so set in my head that med-rare (or god help me, rare) ground beef turns my stomach a little.

You do some criminal things with pork in the us. When I was last in nyc, I cooked a meal with tracer habd and emma b. I searched around for pork chops and it was impossible to find any that hadn't had theoir fat trimmed down to a couple of mililmetres or so and not the 3/4 inch minimum required for good cooking. Its not like you have to eat the fat, although if the meat is good, you'd be a fool not to.

But heh what can I say I had taco bell for tea before my body revolted and sent me on an errand to find whole foods and $3 quart organic grapefruit juice. (That still seems somewhat cheap to me).

Yeah, but YOUR mother? You cold bastard.

Hmm, after some googling, here's Symbol III, the current "ideal."

I've burnt skin and hair accidentally as Im sure many of us have, and it does have a weird sicky bacon sweet smell. But I'm more relying on anecdote to be honest: my old next door neighbour Simon had extensive 3rd degree burn scars all down one side of his face and neck and we asked why one day while we were all drinking. He said he'd been trying to build a volcano out of sand and kerosene on the parents farm, and of course it all went wrong and blew up and he caught fire... and he said he'll never forget the smell of his own flesh burning, "like roast pork". Urgh.

I learned all my love of cooking and skillzor from dad, not mum.

The thing is that Americans don't give a damn about tea. Tea: meh.

If stewed for a couple of hours it goes that 'falling apart in the mouth' way, it's the only meat I use for stewing.

skirt steak i think is one of my favorites to make at home. so cheap. and leftovers i can reheat and heat up a corn tortilla and make a taco. also like hangar steak

My mother's Stouffer's Entrees Swedish Meatballs were to die for. She could boil-in-bag like nobody else.

Or it is the fault of good taste.

Or it is the fault of "just cut off its horns and wipe its ass".

ha! I don't know if I even know enough about steak cut + cow anatomy to be able to do this.

If anyone ever has the opportunity to eat any animal from Four Story Hill's Farm in Pennsylvania, I urge them to accept the hefty price-tag and indulge.

Also: Ask the Meatman. Interactive butchering diagrams for beef, pork, and deer.

this guy just drove onto my driveway and my housemate bought a bunch of steaks. STEAK DINNER!!

"You are much more likely to catch it from fresh bear or wild cat meat than from farm-raised pork nowaday"
Erm, I read thru this thread but I must have missed the point where someone asked who is eating fresh bear and wild cat meat?

Still mooing, pls.

There aren't any really great steakhouses near here -- I miss Cattlemen's, the Central- and Northern-California chain. Outback is a crapshoot, but I had a really good ribeye there last weekend.

Outback is a crapshoot

OTM. I've had awesome - literally, melt in my mouth, holy cow this is a good steak awesome - at Outback, and I've had steaks where I just want the waitress to bring me another 24 oz. beer and another blooming onion and we'll call it even.

Damn, I love a good steak.

Outback can eat a dick.

I like it well done, but this thread is actually the reason why I don't go out for dinner with my parents anymore, due to the fear that one of them will respond to the thread question with "JUST CUT OFFA ITS HORNS AND WA-IPE ITS AY-ASS!" in a god-awful pseudo Texan drawl. Every time. Without fail.

Let me remind you that we live in Middle England.

roo steak has to be rare otherwise it's no good.

for me beef, rare or medium.

Also I'm noticing more american-styled "australian steak houses" popping up around the place. which is weird.

Roo steak is so easy to overcook! But rare it is awesome, esp marinated in a good red wine.

gotta be rare

medium

I had a roo steak in melbourne, at a pub near brunswick street. it wasn't bad, but i think i prefer australian lamb... kangaroo meat is so lean!! i need some fat

Yeah thats why it's only any good rare and very marinated, it gets way too tough otherwise (and as it's so gamey, thats just not great).

I've gone off lamb a little bit, which is a good thing as it has become so immensely pricey.

rare, maybe medium rare.

medium rare for me. i think it's been almost a year since my last steak.

how many hail marys for that?

I order rare and eat what I'm served. I'm trying to learn to do that thing people do where they bitch and moan all the way through dessert about how medium their steak was, but I just don't have the knack for it.

I ask for medium in non-reputable places and figure it has a 10-degree fuck up in either direction for satisfactory meatness. Rare in good/well-heeled places.